Showing Up

Also, the Tea Party — which wasn’t around back in 2008 — is adding grassroots muscle that the GOP lacked last time around. All over the country, Tea Partiers are doing the unglamorous work of knocking on doors, compiling voter lists, arranging Election Day car pools and so on. And in some places, they’re going further.

One project — Volunteers for Virginia — aims to take people from red states like Tennessee and Texas and get them to Virginia, a swing state, to do grassroots work between now and Nov. 6. Another group, NobamaNevada, is taking Tea Partiers from deep-blue California to work in swing-state Nevada. In both cases, the idea is to move resources from where they won’t help to places where they will.

That’s the sort of thing that big-bucks professional campaigns do all the time. But this time, the Tea Party movement is doing it on its own. Self-organizing, rather than being organized.

This is all unreported by the media, which is a good thing, I think. Will it be enough? I sincerely hope it is. I’m continually surprised at how well informed some people are. I hear comments almost every day from people who are not political junkies that indicate they are paying a lot of attention – negative attention – to what the 0ne is doing. They are not happy and don’t want four more years of this. They just don’t advertise how they feel.

If enough of those people show up to vote, we’ll get the real change we need.